Rebel Wilson has opened up about using her own experience in growing up in Australia for her new children’s book, Bella The Brave.
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Speaking to The Morning Show from Los Angeles, the Pitch Perfect star explained how her own childhood growing up in western Sydney helped inspire her writing.
“I kind of wanted to use stories from my real life to hopefully inspire and motivate young kids everywhere,” she told the hosts.
“The first book is about overcoming shyness and it talks about a story where my mum dragged me into a local community centre to join the girl’s choir.
“I found that through the creative arts I could learn to express myself and then overcome my shyness, which is what happened in real life as well,” Rebel revealed.
The actor also revealed that Bella the Brave will be the first in a series of books.
“This is the first one, but they’ll be about different things. The next one will be about body positivity and then the third one about siblings.
Rebel continued, “There’s so many stories that I have from my childhood to utilise, so it was hard to choose which ones go first. But I think for me, overcoming shyness really was the first big obstacle in my life.
“I was, kind of the kid that was painfully shy, my face would go all red when the teacher asked me just a simple question, and I wouldn’t want to answer even though I knew the answer.
“So, overcoming shyness I thought that’ll be first off the block in the books,” explained Rebel.
“That’s why nobody ever thought I’d become an actress, and it wasn’t really, in real life, until my teenage years that I really did break out of my shell and started making proper friends and having proper social interactions.
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“But I was really, really shy and found it hard to relate to other kids when I was young. But I forced myself and my mum helped me a lot by dragging me to that community centre,” she added.
Rebel Wilson’s book Bella the Brave is available at Booktopia for $17.95
